Blockchain

ABOUT BLOCKCHAIN

Within the last two years Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies became the new tech & financial hype. Immediately, the society started seeking for money investments new opportunities in this domain, hoping for fortunes making. Mainly because of Bitcoin and a few other key cryptocurrencies. In parallel, media have been giving warnings almost every day about the risk of virtual value of these cryptocurrencies, lack of legal&financial regulations, etc., giving a shadow onto the Blockchain technical foundations and its philosophy. Technology, that may appear to be a breakthrough, most probably like the Internet dissemination in the 80’s.

NEVER ENDING QUESTIONS ABOUT BLOCKCHAIN …

Blockchain allows any digital information to be distributed in a secure way to the other business parties. It can not be copied or changed. Its value and origin can be easily confirmed in real-time by the other network elements (devices). So in case one of the network elements is hacked (speaking about frauds), the other element will give a signal : “hey, we have another value for this particular event”. This gives grounds for the new security of the transactions and information distribution. This is based on network elements with no need for any third party organization to watch the security of transaction or information flow. Like with the banks today, who secure the e.g. money transfer transactions between payer and receiver. This can be watched with network elements in Blockchain, and traditional bank activity is not required any more.

Not only speaking about financial transactions, but digital information distribution in general, this makes in fact the grounds for the new type of internet. What is more, like with the traditional internet we have today, iPhones, cars… we do not need to know how they are built and how they work. We just use them. The same will happen with Blockchain.

WHO WANTS IT?

There is a rising group of industries (financial market, telecom operators, etc.) that look at Blockchain as a technology that may completely reshape the business paradigm and daily operation structures. That can bring completely new business cases and new revenue streams. The biggest advantage appears to be limiting the number of business partners watching (securing) the information flow. This in turn allows for transaction costs reduction, as the information origin or process flow correctness will be already secured in the new internet, read: in Blockchain.

VARIOUS BLOCKCHAINS

The need for being different from the competition today drives more and more companies to experiment with Blockchain technology. They seek the way how to implement it into commercial use, but the first obstacle they come across is: investment entry barrier. Technically, they are not willing to create the separate Blockchain divisions to develop the technology. Business departments expect just to use it, like the Internet. And do not want to concentrate on building it from scratch. What the business users expect is the technology that will be easy to operate and at the same time cheap and fast to implement.

Nowadays we can point out 30-40 active Blockchain implementations that target different business focus, not speaking about cryptocurrencies only. This is just the beginning, so that we have to be careful about, in order to avoid building the solution based on wrong assumptions. On the other hand, comprehensive, complete exploration of Blockchain technology for the efficient commercial use is not possible yet.

ECOSYSTEM

And this is exactly what IMPAQ aims at and supports in daily development today. We have this great opportunity to attend Blockchain ecosystem development, driven by one of German leading telecom operators. The key goal is to enable “Blockchain in the Cloud” and deliver the platform “Blockchain Backend as a Service”.

Simply speaking, the target platform will put away the headache coming from most of technical constrains:

which Blockchain implementation I shall select,

how I should configure the system’s environment to run the Blockchain apps, etc.

Such an „umbrella” for Blockchain networks will allow the commercial user to click on the preferred components coming from different suppliers in Blockchain ecosystem and build own environment tailored to specific use case within minutes, not weeks or months.